A couple of months ago I had a lively and intense conversation with Secret Entourage founder Pejman Ghadimi about marketing and branding. The result is a 38 minute podcast posted here. With digital and social roaring away, this is quite a different conversation than I would have had a decade or more ago. And with my roles as chairman of three early-stage companies, my perspective is today is a little different from my lifetime of working in and alongside large corporations. We talked about:

• How I got involved with branding and marketing
• Everything starts with purpose
• Why your work purpose and your life purpose need to be integrated
• The difference between leadership and management
• What qualities to demonstrate to secure a job
• How an organization structure needs to be like an amoeba
• What traditional advertising agencies are under serious threat
• What’s missing from your brand to bring it to the next level
• The role of marketing has changed to create a movement, not build a brand
• Lovemarks, and how to create loyalty beyond reason
• Survival of the fastest
• All marketing is designed to do one thing: sell more stuff
• The secrets to successful marketing in today’s society
• The difference between transformational, informational, and disruptive creativity
• What Amazon does to succeed

Bio of my interviewer, Secret Entourage founder Pejman Ghadimi: a self-made entrepreneur and best-selling book author born in 1982 in the middle of a revolution in Iran, Peham spent the majority of his childhood in France, eventually migrating to the United States in 1997. Raised by a single mother his entire life with very limited resources, Pejman quickly adapted to the idea of being resourceful. Due to lack of finances and the inability to go to college due to family obligations, Pejman chose to start working from a young age and focused his efforts on banking where he built a name for himself very quickly, climbing the ladder all the way to the VP level in a four years without any type of formal education or formalized training. Fast forward three years and Pejman left banking to found three major businesses: VIP Motoring, Secret Consulting, and Secret Entourage (which collectively have grossed over $40M in revenue annually). Pejman shares a unique perspective on success and entrepreneurship; one that involves the birth of innovation through the impact made on others as well as the human connections we create daily backed by years of effective and practical leadership skills. Pejman’s most recent best seller Third Circle Theory focuses on a unique roadmap to achieving a higher level of self-awareness leveraging the power of entrepreneurship.